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Aside from their practical applications, these findings indicate that reductive carboxylation is not required for the proliferation of CD8+ T cells, as it appears to be for rapidly growing cancer cells.

Ho says his team now plans to examine how best to sabotage reductive carboxylation to prepare better cells for CAR-T and other adoptive T cell therapies, comparing pharmacologic inhibition with gene editing strategies to that end.

In the absence of oxygen, cancer cells resort to a very specific survival mechanism: they metabolise the amino acid glutamine as an alternative source of energy through a chemical reaction known as ''reductive carboxylation''.

To investigate the role of reductive carboxylation, the scientists inhibited this mechanism in CAR-T cells in mouse models of leukemia and multiple myeloma, two blood cancers.

Reductive carboxylation acts directly on the generation of metabolites, small chemical elements that modify histones, to influence DNA packaging and to prevent accessibility to longevity genes.